He continues:

I use this statement of Mr. Lane’s not because it represents the broadest and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the majority of Southern people. It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has elected other governors. Hoke Smith’s argument was essentially this:

Hoke Smith’s Views

The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; “he is contented to occupy the natural status of his race, the position of inferiority.” The educated and intelligent Negro, who wants to vote, is a disturbing and threatening influence. We don’t want him down here; let him go North.

This feeling regarding the educated Negro, who, as Mr. Lane says, “ascertains his rights and forces his way to assert them,” is the basic fact in Southern politics. It is what keeps the white people welded together in a single party; it is what sternly checks revolts and discourages independence.

Keeping this fact in mind, let us look more intimately into Southern conditions.

Following ordinary usage I have spoken of the Solid South. As a matter of fact the South is not solid, nor is there a single party. The very existence of one strong party presupposes another, potentially as strong. In the South to-day there are, as inevitably as human nature, two parties and two political points of view. And one is aristocratic and the other is democratic.

It is noteworthy in the pages of history that parties which were once democratic become in time aristocratic. We are accustomed for example, to look back upon Magna Charta as a mighty instrument of democracy; which it was; but it was not democracy according to our understanding of the word. It merely substituted a baronial oligarchy for the divine-right rule of one man, King John. It did not touch the downtrodden slaves, serfs and peasants of England. And yet that struggle of the barons was of profound moment in history, for it started the spirit of democracy on its way downward, it was the seed from which sprung English constitutionalism, which finally flowered in the American republic.

Tillman, as I have shown, wrung democracy from the old slave-owning oligarchy. He conquered: he established a democracy in South Carolina which included poor whites as well as aristocrats. But Tillman in his fiery pleas for the rights of men no more considered the Negro than the old barons considered the serfs of their day in the struggle against King John. It was and is incomprehensible to him that the Negro “has any rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

In short we have in the South the familiar and ancient division of social forces, but instead of two white parties, we now see a white aristocratic party, which seeks to control the government, monopolise learning, and supervise the division of labour and the products of labour, struggling with a democratic party consisting of a few white and many coloured people, which clamours for a part in the government. That, in plain words, is the true situation in the South to-day.

Has the Spirit of Democracy Crossed the Colour Line?

For democracy is like this: once its ferment begins to work in a nation it does not stop until it reaches and animates the uttermost man. Though Tillman’s hatred and contempt of the Negro who has aspirations is without bounds, the spirit which he voiced in his wild campaigns does not stop at the colour line. Movements are so much greater than men, often going so much further than men intend. A prophet who stands out for truth as Tillman did cannot, having uttered it, thereafter limit it nor recall it. As I have been travelling about the country, how often I have heard the same animating whisper from the Negroes that Tillman heard in older days among the poor whites:

“We are free; we are free.”

Yes, Tillman and Vardaman are right; education, newspapers, books, commercial prosperity, are working in the Negro too; he, too, has the world-old disease of restlessness, ambition, hope. And many a Negro leader and many a Negro organisation—and that is what is causing the turmoil in the South, the fear of the white aristocracy—are voicing the equivalent of Tillman’s bold words:

“Awake! arise! or be forever fallen.”

Now we may talk all we like about the situation, we may say that the Negro is wrong in entertaining such ambitions, that his hopes can never be gratified, that he is doomed forever to menial and inferior occupations—the plain fact remains (as Tillman himself testifies), that the democratic spirit has crossed the colour line irrespective of laws and conventions, that the Negro is restless with the ambition to rise, to enjoy all that is best, finest, most complete in this world. How humanly the ancient struggle between aristocracy seeking to maintain its “superiority” and democracy fighting for “equality” is repeating itself! And this struggle in the South is complicated, deeply and variously, by the fact that the lower people are black and of a different race. They wear on their faces the badge of their position.

What is being done about it?

As every student of history is well aware, no aristocracy ever lets go until it is compelled to. How bitterly King John fought his barons; how bitterly the South Carolina gentlemen fought the rude Tillman! Having control of the government, the newspapers, the political parties, the schools, an aristocracy surrounds and fortifies itself with every possible safeguard. It maintains itself at any cost. And that is both human and natural; that is what is happening in the South to-day. Exactly the same conflict occurred before the war when the old slave-owning aristocracy (which everyone now acknowledges to have been wrong) was defending itself and the institution upon which its existence depended. The old slave-owning aristocrats believed that they were made of finer clay than the “poor whites,” that their rule was peculiarly beneficent, that if anything should happen to depose them the country would go to ruin and destruction. It was the old, old conviction, common to kings and oligarchies, that they were possessed of a divine right, a special and perpetual franchise from God.

The White South Defends Itself

The present white aristocratic party in the South is defending itself exactly after the manner of all aristocracies.

In the first place, having control of the government it has entrenched itself with laws. The moment, for example, that the Negro began to develop any real intelligence and leadership, the disfranchisement process was instituted. Laws were so worded that every possible white man be admitted to the franchise and every possible Negro (regardless of his intelligence) be excluded. These laws now exist in nearly all the Southern states. Although the XV Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares that the right to vote shall not be “denied or abridged ... on account of race or colour or previous condition of servitude,” the South, in defence of its white aristocracy, has practically nullified this amendment. Governor Hoke Smith of Georgia, for example, said (June 9, 1906):

Not only do the enacted laws disfranchise all possible Negroes, but many other Negroes who have enough property or education to qualify, are further disfranchised by the dishonest administration of those laws. For the machinery of government, being wholly in white hands, the registers and judges of election have power to keep out any Negro, however fit he may be. I know personally of many instances in which educated and well-to-do Negroes have been refused the right to register where ignorant white men were readily admitted.

The law, after all, in this matter, plays very little figure. The white majority has determined to control the government utterly and to give the Negro, whether educated or not, no political influence. That is the plain truth of the matter. Listen to Hoke Smith in his campaign pledge of last year:

“I favour, and if elected will urge with all my power, the elimination of the Negro from politics.”

Let us also quote the plain-speaking Vardaman in his address of April, 1907, at Poplarville, Miss.:

It may be argued that this violent expression does not represent the best sentiment of the South. It does not; and yet Vardaman, Tillman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others of the type are elected, the majority in their states support them. And I am talking here of politics, which deals with majorities. In a following chapter I shall hope to deal with the reconstructive and progressive minority in the South as it expresses itself especially in the more democratic border states like North Carolina.

Thus the spirit of democracy has really escaped among the coloured people and it is running abroad like a prairie fire. Tillman, the prophet, sees it:

“Every man,” he says, “who can look before his nose can see that with Negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who can read and write among the coloured race ... will in time encroach upon our white men.”

Demand Repeal of XV Amendment

In order, then, to prevent the Negro getting into politics, the Tillmans, Vardamans, and others declare that the South must strike at the foundation of his political liberty: the XV Amendment must be repealed. In short, the moment the Negro meets one test of citizenship, these political leaders advance a more difficult one: now proposing to take away entirely every hope of ultimate citizenship. In the recent campaign for the United States senatorship in Mississippi, Vardaman and John Sharp Williams were quite in accord on this point, though they disagreed on methods of accomplishing the purpose. When the political liberty of the Negro has thus been finally removed, the South, say these men, will again have two parties, and will be able to take the place it should occupy in the counsels of the nation.

Take the next point in the logic of the political leaders. It is a fact of common knowledge in history that aristocracies cannot long survive when free education is permitted among all classes of people. Education is more potent against oligarchies and aristocracies than dynamite bombs. Every aristocracy that has survived has had to monopolise learning more or less completely—else it went to the wall. It is not surprising that there should have been no effective public-school system in the South before the war where the poor whites could get an education, or that the teaching of Negroes was in many states a crime punishable by law. Education enables the Negro, as Mr. Lane says, to “ascertain his rights and force his way to assert them.” Therefore to prevent his ascertaining his rights he must not be educated. The undivided supremacy of the white party, it is clearly discerned, is bound up with Negro ignorance. Therefore we have seen and are now seeing in certain parts of the South continuous agitation against the education of Negroes. That is one reason for the feeling in the South against “Northern philanthropy” which is contributing money to support Negro schools and colleges.

“What the North is sending South is not money,” says Vardaman, “but dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes. They’re demanding equality.”

A Southern View of Negro Education

When I was in Montgomery, Ala., a letter was published in one of the newspapers from Alexander Troy, a well-known lawyer. It did not express the view of the most thoughtful men of that city, but I am convinced that it represented with directness and force the belief of a large proportion of the white people of Alabama. The letter says:

These are Mr. Troy’s words and they found reflection in the discussions of the Alabama legislature then in session. A compulsory education bill had been introduced; the problem was to pass a law that would apply to white people, not to Negroes. In this connection I heard a significant discussion in the state senate. I use the report of it, for accuracy, as given the next morning in the Advertiser:

The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.

In cutting off an $8,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured) Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said:

“I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic. God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn College.”

Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political leadership in the South.

Economic Cause for White Supremacy

Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to monopolise government and learning, is because it wishes to supervise the division of labour and the products of labour. That is the bottom fact.

In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely and took all the profits. In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage, he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits. But as the Negro has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour. He is no longer willing to be an abject “hewer of wood and a drawer of water” as he was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own business, employ his own professional men, and so on. He will not “keep his place” as a servant. And that is the basis of all the trouble.

Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into a statement of this position.

At the American Bankers’ Association last fall Governor Swanson of Virginia said:

“At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God’s help and our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is.”

In other words, the white man will by force hold all political, business and financial positions; he will be boss, and the Negro must do the menial work; he must be a servant.

Hoke Smith says in his speech (the italics are mine):

“Those Negroes who are contented to occupy the natural status of their race, the position of inferiority, all competition being eliminated between the whites and the blacks, will be treated with greater kindness.”

In other words, if the Negro will be contented to keep himself inferior and not compete with the white man, everything will be all right. And thus, curiously enough, while Hoke Smith in his campaign was thundering against railroad corporations for destroying competition, while he was glorifying the principle of “free and unrestricted trade,” he was advocating the formation of a monopoly of all white men by the elimination of the competition of all coloured men.

Indeed, we find sporadic attempts to pass laws to compel the Negro to engage only in certain sorts of menial work. In Texas not long ago a bill was introduced in the legislature “to confine coloured labour to the farm whenever it was found in city and town communities to be competing with white labour.” In the last session of the Arkansas legislature Senator McKnight introduced a bill providing that Negroes be forbidden “from waiting on white persons in hotels, restaurants, or becoming barbers, or porters on trains, and to prevent any white man from working for any Negro.”

In a number of towns respectable, educated, and prosperous Negro doctors, grocers, and others have been forcibly driven out. I visited Monroe, La., where two Negro doctors had been forced to leave town because they were taking the practice of white physicians. In the same town a Negro grocer was burned out, because he was encroaching on the trade of white grocers.

Neither of the laws above referred to, of course, was passed; and the instances of violence I have given are sporadic and unusual. For the South has not followed the dominant political leaders to the extremes of their logic. Human nature never, finally, goes to extremes: it is forever compromising, never wholly logical. While perhaps a large proportion of Southerners would agree perfectly with Hoke Smith or Tillman in his theory of a complete supremacy of all white men in all respects, as a matter of fact nearly every white Southerner is encouraging some practical exception which quite overturns the theory. Tens of thousands of white Southerners swear by Booker T. Washington, and though doubtful about Negro education, the South is expending millions of dollars every year on coloured schools. Vardaman, declaiming violently against Negro colleges, has actually, in specific instances, given them help and encouragement. I told how he had cut off an $8,000 appropriation from Alcorn College because he did not believe in Negro education: but he turned around and gave Alcorn College $14,000 for a new lighting system, because he had come in personal contact with the Negro president of Alcorn College, and liked him.

And though the politicians may talk about complete Negro disfranchisement, the Negro has nowhere been completely disfranchised: a few Negroes vote in every part of the South.

I once heard a Southerner argue for an hour against the participation of the Negro in politics, and then ten minutes later tell me with pride of a certain Negro banker in his city whom we both knew.

“Dr. ——’s all right,” he said. “He’s a sensible Negro. I went with him myself when he registered. He ought to vote.”

So personal relationships, the solving touch of human nature, play havoc with political theories and generalities. Mankind develops not by rules but by exceptions to rules. While the white aristocracy has indeed succeeded in controlling local government in the South almost completely, it has not been able to dominate the federal political organisations, which include many Negroes. And though often opposing education for the Negro, the aristocracy has not, after all, monopolised education; and the Negro, in spite of Jim Crow laws and occasional violence, has actually been pushing ahead, getting a foothold in landownership, entering the professions, even competing in some lines of business with white men. So democracy, though black, is encroaching in the world-old way on aristocracy; how far Negroes can go toward real democratic citizenship in the various lines—industrial, political, social—no man knows. We can see the fight; we do not know how the spoils of war will finally be divided.

CHAPTER XII

In the next chapter, under the title “The New Southern Statesmanship,” I shall outline the programme and recount the activities of the new Southern leaders.

The Most Sinister Form of Negro Domination

Travelling in the South one hears much of the “threat of Negro domination,” by which is generally meant political control by Negro voters or the election of Negro officeholders. But there already exists a far more real and sinister form of Negro domination. For the Negro still dominates the thought of the South. For over eighty years, until quite recently, few great or serious issues have occupied the attention of the South save those growing out of slavery and the Negro problem. Though the very existence of our nation is due largely to the courage, wisdom, and political genius of Southern statesmanship—to Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Patrick Henry, and their compatriots—the South, since the enunciation of the Monroe doctrine in 1823, has played practically no constructive part in national affairs. As Professor Mitchell of Richmond well points out, the great, vitalising influences which swept over the entire civilised world during the first half of the nineteenth century, the liberalising, nationalising, industrialising influences, left the South untouched. For it was chained in common slavery with the Negro. Instead of expanding with the new thought, it clung to slavery in opposition to the liberal tendency of the age, it insisted upon states’ rights in opposition to nationality, it contented itself with agriculture alone, instead of embracing the rising industrialism. “It was an instance,” as Professor Mitchell says, “of arrested development.”

Dr. John E. White of Atlanta has ably expressed the ethical result upon a people of confining their thought to a single selfish interest:

“As long as we struggled for that which was good for everybody everywhere,” he says, “we moved with Providence and the South led the van. There were great human concerns in the building up of the Republic. The whole world was interested in it. It was a work ennobling to a people—the inspiration of a great national usefulness. The disaster began when the South began to think only for and of itself—began to have only one problem.”

Thus the South, owing to the presence of the Negro, dropped behind in the progress of the world. And while the new and vitalising world influences are now spreading abroad throughout the South, manifesting themselves in factories, mines, mills, better schools, and more railroads, the old, ugly Negro problem still shackles political thought and cripples freedom of action. In other words, the South is being rapidly industrialised, but not so rapidly liberalised and nationalised, though these developments are certainly following.

Exploiting Negro Prejudice

The cause of this dominance of thought by the Negro lies chiefly with a certain group of politicians whose interest it is to maintain their party control and to keep the South solid. And they do this by harping perpetually on the Negro problem. I observed, wherever I went in the South and found busy and prosperous industries, that the Negro problem was little discussed. One manufacturer in New Orleans said to me, when I asked him about the Negro question:

“Why, I’m so busy I never think about it.”

And that is the attitude of the progressive, constructive Southerner: he is impatient with the talk about the Negro and the Negro problem. He wants to forget it.

But there remains a body of men in the South who, not prosperous in other industries, still make the Negro a sort of industry: they live by exploiting Negro prejudice. They prevent the expression of new ideas and force a great people to confine its political genius to a worn-out issue.

Roosevelt Democrats Down South

Talking with all classes of white men in the South, I was amazed to discover how many of them had ceased to be Democrats (in the party sense) at all, and were followers in their beliefs of Roosevelt and the Republican party. Many of them told me that they wished they could break away and express themselves openly and freely, but they did not dare. A considerable number have ventured to vote the Republican ticket in national elections (especially on the free-silver issue), but few indeed have had the courage to declare their independence in state or local affairs. For the instant a rift appears in the harmony of the white party (and that is a better name for it than Democratic) the leaders talk Negro, and the would-be independents are driven back into the fold. Over and over again leaders with new issues have endeavoured to get a hearing. A number of years ago the Populist movement spread widely throughout the South. Tom Watson of Georgia, Kolb of Alabama, Butler of North Carolina, led revolts against the old Democratic party. By fusion with the Republicans the Populists carried North Carolina. But the old political leaders immediately raised the Negro issue, declared that the Populists were encouraging the Negro vote, and defeated the insurgents, driving most of their leaders into political obscurity. Now, I am not arguing that Populism was an ideal movement, nor that its leaders were ideal men; I am merely trying to show the cost of independence in the South. A number of years ago Emory Speer, of Georgia, now Federal Judge, ran for Congress on an independent ticket. His platform was “The Union and the Constitution, a free ballot and a fair count.” The inevitable Negro issue was raised against him, it was insisted that there must be no division among white people lest the Negro secure the balance of political power, and Speer was finally defeated. He became a Republican and has since had no influence in state politics.

Upon this point an able Southern writer, Professor Edwin Mims of Trinity College, N. C., has said:

“The independents in the South have to face the same state of affairs that the independents of the North did in the ’80’s—all the better traditions connected with one party, and most of the respectable people belonging to the same party. Just as George William Curtis and his followers were accused of being Democrats in disguise and of being traitors to the ‘grand old party’ that had saved the Union and freed the slaves, and deserters to a party of Copperheads, so the Southern independent is said to be a Republican in disguise, and is told of the awful crimes of the Reconstruction era. When all other arguments have failed, there is the inevitable appeal to the threatened domination of an inferior race which is not now even a remote possibility.”

As a result of this domination of a worn-out issue, political contests in the South have ordinarily concerned themselves not with stimulating public questions, but with the personal qualifications of the candidates. The South has not dared to face real problems lest the white party be split and the Negro voter somehow slip into influence. A campaign was fought last year in Mississippi. Of course the candidates all belonged to the white party; all therefore subscribed to identically the same platform—which had been prepared by the party leaders—so that the only issue was the personality of the candidates. Let me quote from the Mississippi correspondent of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, April 29, 1907:

Negro Holds Democratic Party Together

I am speaking here, of course, of the Negro as a dominant issue, the essential element which holds the Democratic party together and without which other policies could not be carried or candidates elected. Vigorous divisions on other issues have taken place locally within the lines of the Democratic party, especially during the last two or three years. The railroad and trust questions have been prominently before the people in most of the Southern states. During his long campaign for governor Hoke Smith talked railroads and railroad influence in politics constantly, but in order to be elected he raised the Negro question and talked it vigorously, especially in all of his country addresses. It is also highly significant that the South should have taken so strong a lead in the prohibition movement, although even this question has been more or less connected with the Negro problem, the argument being that the South must forbid the liquor traffic because of its influence on the Negro. No states in the Union, indeed, have been more radical in dealing with the trust question than Texas and Arkansas; and Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina have been the scenes of some of the hottest fights in the country on the railroad question. All this goes to show that, once freed from the incubus of the Negro on Southern thought, the South would instantly become a great factor in national questions. And being almost exclusively American in its population, with few rich men and ideals of life not yet so subservient to the dollar as those of the North, it would become a powerful factor in the progressive and constructive movements of the country. The influence of a single bold man like Tillman in the Senate has been notable. In the future the country has much to look for from the idealism of Southern statesmanship.

Stifling Free Speech

But the unfortunate result of the dominance of the single idea of the Negro upon politics has been to benumb the South intellectually; to stifle free thought and free speech. Let a man advance a new issue and if the party leaders do not favour it they have only to cry out “Negro,” twisting the issue so as to emphasise its Negro side (and every question in the South has a Negro side), and the independent thinker is crushed. I once talked with the editor of a newspaper in the South who said to me, “such and such is my belief.”

“But,” I said, “you take just the opposite position in your paper.”

“Yes—but I can’t talk out; it would kill my business.”

This timorousness has touched not only politics, but has reached the schools and the churches—and still shackles the freest speech. George W. Cable, the novelist, was practically forced to leave the South because he advocated the “continual and diligent elevation of that lower man which human society is constantly precipitating,” because he advocated justice for the Negro.

Professor Andrew Slade was compelled to resign from Emory College in Georgia because he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly taking a point of view not supported by the majority in Southern sentiment! Professor John Spencer Bassett was saved from a forced resignation from Trinity College in North Carolina for a similar offence after a lively fight in the Board of Trustees which left Trinity with the reputation of being one of the freest institutions in the South.

The situation in the South has made people afraid of the truth. Political oratory, particularly, often gets away entirely from the wholesome and regenerative world of actual facts. I quoted in the last chapter from a speech of Governor Swanson of Virginia, in which he said: “The business houses and financial institutions are in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God’s help and our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is.”

Negro’s Progress in Richmond

What a curious thing oratory is! Right in Governor Swanson’s own city of Richmond there are four banks owned and operated by Negroes; one of the Negro bankers sat in the convention to which Governor Swanson was at that moment speaking. There is a Negro insurance company, “The True Reformers,” in which I saw eighty Negro clerks and stenographers at work. It has a surplus of $300,000, with a business in thirty states. Negroes also own and operate in Richmond four clothing stores, five drug stores, many grocery stores (some very small, of course), two hotels, four livery stables, five printing establishments, eight fraternal insurance companies, seven meat markets, fifty eating-places, and many other sorts of business enterprises, small, of course, but growing rapidly. In Richmond also, there are ten Negro lawyers, fifteen physicians, three dentists, two photographers, eighty-five school teachers, forty-six Negro churches.

Southerners Who See the Danger

When I make the assertion regarding “free speech” and the fear of truth in the South, I am making no statement which has not been far more forcibly put by thoughtful and fearless Southerners who see and dread this sinister tendency.

The late Chancellor Hill, of the University of Georgia, spoke of the “deadly paralysis of intellect caused by the enforced uniformity of thought within the lines of one party.” He said:

“Before the war the South was in opposition to the rest of civilisation on the question of slavery. It defended itself: its thinking, its political science, even its religion was not directed toward a search for truth, but it was concentrated on the defence of a civil and political order of things. These conditions made impossible a vigorous intellectual life.”

William Preston Few, dean of Trinity College, North Carolina, writes (South Atlantic Quarterly, January, 1905):

“This prevalent lack of first hand thinking and of courage to speak out has brought about an unfortunate scarcity of intellectual honesty.”

An excellent illustration of this condition grew out of the statement of Dr. Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, at a dinner a year or so ago, in which he compared the recent political leadership of the South somewhat unfavourably with the statesmanship of the Old South. Upon hearing of this remark Senator Bailey of Texas angrily resigned from the alumni committee of the University. Chancellor Hill said, concerning the incident:

“The question whether Dr. Alderman was right or wrong becomes insignificant beside the larger question whether Senator Bailey was right or wrong in his method of dealing with a difference of opinion. And this leads to the question: Have we freedom of opinion in the South? Must every man who thinks above a whisper do so at the peril of his reputation and his influence, or at the deadlier risk of having an injury inflicted upon the institution which he represents?”

In giving so much space to the words and position of Vardaman, Tillman, Hoke Smith, and others, I have not yet sufficiently emphasised the work and influence of the thoughtful and constructive men of the South. But it must be borne in mind that I am writing of politics, of majorities: and politicians of the Tillman type are still the political forces in the South. They are in control: they are elected. Yet there is the growing class of new statesmen whose work I shall recount in the next chapter.

Whites Disfranchised as Well as Blacks

But the limitation of intellectual freedom has not been the only result of the political dominance of the Negro issue. It is curious to observe that when one class of men in any society is forced downward politically, another is forced up: for so mankind keeps its balances and averages. A significant phase of the movement in the South to eliminate the Negro is the sure return to government by a white aristocracy. For disfranchisement of the Negro has also served to disfranchise a very large proportion of the white people as well. In every Southern state where Negro disfranchisement has been forced, the white vote also has been steadily dwindling. To-day in Alabama not half the white males of voting age are qualified voters. In Mississippi the proportion is still lower.

In the last Presidential election the state of Mississippi was carried by Parker with a total vote of only 58,383, out of a total of 349,177 citizens (both white and coloured) of voting age. Only one-third of the white men voted. It has been found, indeed, in several counties in Mississippi, that while the number of white eligibles has been decreasing, the number of Negroes on the registration lists has been increasing. In the city of Jackson, Miss., last year, 1,200 voters were registered out of a population of 32,000 people.

To show the dwindling process, take the single country of Tallapoosa in Alabama. The last census shows 4,203 whites and 2,036 blacks of voting age, 6,259 in all. After the adoption of the new constitution disfranchising the Negro in 1901, the total registration was 4,008. Last fall, although the important question of prohibition had arisen and an especial effort was made to get voters out, an investigation showed there were only 1,700 qualified voters in the country.

This astonishing condition is due primarily to the fact that there is no vital party division on new issues in the South; but it is also due to the franchise tests, which, having been made severe to keep the Negro out, operate also to disfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and ignorant white men. I spent much time talking with white workingmen, both in the cities and in the country. I asked them why so many workingmen and farmers did not vote. Here is one comprehensive reply of a labour leader:

“What’s the use? We have to pay two dollars a year poll-tax, and pay it nearly a year before election. And why vote? There are no real issues at stake. An election is merely a personal quarrel in the clique of men who control the Democratic party. Why should we pay two dollars a year and go to the bother of satisfying the personal ambition of some man we are not interested in?”

A White Oligarchy

So the white vote is dwindling; the political power is being gathered into the hands of fewer and fewer men. And there is actually springing up a large class of non-voting white men not unlike the powerless “poor whites” of ante-bellum times. The white politicians, indeed, in some places do not encourage the poorer white men to qualify, for the fewer voters, the more certain their control.

Of course the chief fights in Mississippi and elsewhere are not at the elections, but in the Democratic (white) primaries; but this fact only accentuates the point I wish to make: the limitation of political independence of action. Such conditions are deeply concerning the thoughtful men of the South; but while they think, few dare to brave political extinction by speaking out. One would think that the Republican party, which ostensibly stands for the opposition in the South, would cry out about conditions. But it does not. The fact is, the Republican party, as now constituted in the South, is even a more restricted white oligarchy than the Democratic party. In nearly all parts of the South, indeed, it is a close corporation which controls or seeks to control all the federal offices. Speak out? Of course not. It, too, is attempting to eliminate the Negro (in some places it calls itself “lily white”), and it works not inharmoniously with the Democratic politicians. For the Republican machine in the South really has no quarrel with the Democratic machine; it takes the federal offices which the Democrats cannot get, and the Democrats take local offices which the Republicans know they cannot get.

The South a Weapon in National Conventions

The Republican Presidents at Washington have, unfortunately, played into the hands of the Southern office-holding machine. Why? Partly because Republicans are few in the South and partly because a solid Republican delegation from the South, easily handled and controlled and favouring the administration, is a powerful weapon in national conventions. McKinley played almost absolutely into the hands of this Southern Republican machine, and Hanna operated it. Indeed, McKinley’s nomination was probably due to the skill with which Hanna marshaled this solid phalanx of Southern delegates. Roosevelt has made a number of first-class appointments outside of the machine, even appointing a few Democrats of the high type of Judge Jones of Alabama.

Over and over in this book I have spoken of the Negro as a national, not a Southern issue; and in politics this is peculiarly true. Though having few Republicans, the South, through its office-holding Republican delegations, has largely influenced the choice of more than one Republican president. The “Solid South” is as useful to the Republican party as to the Democratic party. Why the certainty expressed by Republican politicians of the nomination of Taft? Because the national organisation felt sure it could control the Southern delegations. It counted on the “Solid South.”

Thus in a very real sense the government of this entire nation turns upon the despised black man—whether he votes or not!

The Negro’s Political Power in the North

In another way the Southern attitude toward the Negro affects the nation. Owing to disfranchisement and “Jim Crow” laws, thousands of Negroes have moved northward and settled in the great cities, until to-day Negro voters, though they may not (as has been claimed) hold the balance of power, yet wield a great influence in the politics of at least four states—Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and Rhode Island—and are also considerable factors in the political destiny of Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware. The potential influence of the Negro voter in the North is excellently illustrated in the recent campaign for the Republican nomination to the Presidency, especially in the fight in Ohio between Foraker and Taft and in the eagerness displayed by Taft to placate the Negro vote.

In still another way the Negro affects the entire nation. Through its attitude of exclusion the South exercises an influence on national legislation out of all proportion to its voting population. Though nearly all Negroes are disfranchised, as well as a large number of white voters, all these disfranchised voters are counted in the allotment of Congressmen to Southern states.

Out of this has grown a curious condition. In 1904 Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi, which have thirty-five members in Congress, cast 413,516 votes, while Massachusetts alone, with only fourteen Congressmen, cast 445,098 votes.

Here, for example, is the record of South Carolina:

Thus in South Carolina in 1902 an average of about 4,600 voters voted at the election for each Congressman (in 1904, a Presidential year, the average was about 8,100) while in New York State over 40,000 votes are cast in each Congressional district and in Pennsylvania about 38,000.

Now, I am not here criticising this condition; I am merely endeavouring to set down the facts as I find them. My purpose is to illustrate the profound and far-reaching effects of the Negro issue upon the nation. And is it not curious, when all is said, to observe how this rejected black man, whom the South has attempted to eliminate utterly from politics, has been for years changing and warping the entire government of this nation in the most fundamental ways! Did he not cause a civil war, the results of which still curse the country? And though excluded in large measure from the polls, does he not in reality cast his mighty vote for Presidents, Congressmen, Governors?

Often, looking out across the South, it appears to the observer that the Negro has a more far-reaching and real influence on our national life for being excluded from the polls than he would have if he were frankly and justly admitted to the franchise on the same basis as white men.

All the real thinkers and statesmen of the South have looked and longed for the hour when the South, free of this dominance of an ugly issue, should again take its great place in national affairs. In 1875, at the close of Reconstruction, Senator Lamar of Mississippi predicted in a speech at Jackson that the South, having eliminated the Negro from politics, would now divide on new economic issues and become politically healthy. But that has not happened; less division on real issues probably exists in Mississippi to-day than in 1875. Why? Is it not possible that the manner of the elimination of the Negro from politics is wrong? Has it occurred to leaders and statesmen that Negroes who are qualified can be eliminated into politics; that the present method in reality makes the Negro a more dangerous political factor than he would be if he were allowed to vote regularly and quietly?

Southerners Who Are Speaking Out

In spite of the domination of both parties in the South by narrowing groups of leaders there are not wanting men to fight for a new alignment. On the Republican side one of these men is Joseph C. Manning, of Alexander City, Ala., who publishes a paper called the Southern American. He has shown how white men are being disfranchised as well as Negroes, how the South is controlled by a “Bourbon oligarchy” in the Democratic party and a “federal-for-revenue” Republican party—as he calls them. His paper appears every week with his denunciations in big letters, urging the Republican party to reform and become a party of truth and progress.

He says: